Annette Funicello, best remembered as member of the cast of TV's Mickey Mouse Club in the mid and late 1950s before co-starring with Frankie Avalon in a series semi-spicy 1960s American Independent Pictures beach movies, passed away on Monday at Bakersfield, California at age 70.
Miss Funicello passed away from complications from multiple sclerosis.
Annette was the last of the 24 original Mouseketeers chosen for the Mickey Mouse Club, which premiered on October 3, 1955 as an hour-long late-weekday-afternoon show, produced by Walt Disney (who personally discovered Annette at a ballet performance), for the ABC Network. The show, which debut on the same date as Captain Kangaroo, became such a big hit in the ratings that NBC's long-running Howdy Doody Show was exiled to Saturday mornings within a year.
After leaving MMC, Annette would go on to make several movies, most notably, a half-dozen beach movies starring opposite Frankie Avalon for American Independent Pictures during the early and middle 1960s, beginning with "Beach Party" (1963).
After her career in movies largely ended by the late 1960s, Annette became better known in the 1970s for her Skippy Peanut Butter television commercials.
It was in 1987 that she learned that she had MS. She kept that a secret for five years until she spoke out after becoming concerned that the unsteadiness caused by the illness might have been misinterpreted as drunkeness. She set up the Annette Funicello Research Fund for Neurological Disorders and underwent brain surgery in 1999 in an attempt to control tremors caused by her illness.
For many, though, Annette, survived by her second husband, horse breeder Glen Holt, three children, and three grandchildren, remained forever young. Some might even remember words from a ditty from long-ago telecasts:
Ask the birds and ask the bees
And ask the stars above
Who’s their favorite sweet brunette;
You know, each one confesses:
Annette! Annette! Annette!
Thanks for the memories and rest in peace, Annette.
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